Solutions?

“Importantly, solutions are needed for both the short term and for the long term. There has to be some answer for the 1.2 million people already working on American farms, and there has to be a future flow temporary worker program that actually works, so employers can hire workers legally in the future. You shouldn’t have to hire a lawyer to hire a farm worker — there ought to be a better system.

“If you ask growers, most are focused on the short term more on the legalization issue. But in the long run, future flow is much more important.”

Immigration is “an American workforce issue,” Jacoby says. “This workforce has been changing for several decades. American families are having fewer babies; our workforce is getting older – 75 million baby boomers are going to be retiring over the next decade.

“Importantly, the workforce much better educated — in 1960, half the American-born men labor force were high school dropouts; today, less than 10 percent of the American-born men in the work force are high school dropouts.

“But there still is a need for a lot of less-skilled, less-educated workers to fill a wide variety of jobs. The problem is that there are very few workable, legal avenues for unskilled foreign workers to enter the U.S.

“The H2A program is an avenue — but it’s bureaucratic, unwieldy, and most growers won’t use it. Meanwhile, our better-education American workforce is less and less interested in these kinds of jobs.”

If agricultural employers try to hire American workers for their jobs, but can’t, “They should be able to hire foreign workers in a quick, easy, streamlined, legal way,” Jacoby says.

“We desperately need legal foreign workers, but there’s no legal way for them to come here. Yes, we agree that something needs to be done about the 11 million illegal workers in the U.S. But the most important change we have to make is to fix the legal system — to create a legal immigration system that works — so we don’t have even greater problems 20 years from now.”

And in any reform, Jacoby says, there needs to be a provision for year-round workers, for enterprises such as dairies.

More predictability in wages is also a need. “It’s not that wages now are too high or too low — but that they’re arbitrary and unpredictable; it’s very hard for growers to plan and budget. H2A employers want a wage level pegged to the state’s federal minimum wage, which doesn’t fluctuate very much.

“One of biggest topics in debate the past year has been contract labor versus at-will labor. In the Southeast, most growers need workers all summer long; in the West, work tends to move from crop to crop, and employers want more of a market-based situation. Key to any plan is to meet both groups’ needs. Structurally, that probably means quite a change from the H2A program.

One of the “big ideas” in Washington, Jacoby says, is that “we need to take immigration away from the Department of Labor and give it to the USDA. The Department of Labor basically is not on the side of employers; they don’t grasp the complexity of agriculture. This change is in almost every plan being discussed.”

No matter the outcome of the November presidential election, she says, “Agriculture is ripe for immigration reform. Will it be part of a comprehensive program or part of an incremental, step-by-step march toward reform? I believe the best hope is in the incremental reform.

“If the Obama administration were to propose a comprehensive reform program, I don’t really see Republicans going for it, which would put us back in the same stalemate we’ve had for years.

“I think our best hope is to play on the Republican impulse to start fixing the legal immigration system through step-by-step changes, solving some problems, building trust, and then moving from the easier problems up to the harder ones.

“I think ag is well placed now for immigration reform,” Jacoby says. “E-Verify woke a lot of people up to agriculture’s specific labor needs, and a lot of smart thinking has gone into reform. After years of bad blood, agriculture is now more unified.”